Maybe it's just me. But I never thought Halo had any potential to branch out into all these games they're trying to make it into. The entire series revolves around the life and times of Master Chief. Once you leave that it's pretty much as generic as carbon copy sci-fi shooters get (and it was pretty generic to begin with). I know they said the same thing about Super Mario (or at least for the sake of this argument they did) but in the case of those games all the characters weren't a bunch of space marines

Well, the original version of Halo (pre-Microsoft) was to be a MMO game first and foremost, and Apple used to demo it at Mac events. Then Microsoft bought up Bungie, nerfed Oni and killed all development on Halo that wasn't XBox-relevant.

Kinda sad, really, that the dream of MMO Halo was never realised. The ringworld would have made an interesting battleground.

I won't quibble the details, but I do recall Bungie extolling the fact that they were going to put all players on the same "world", thus Massively Multiplayer Online. Halo's selling point was how it was going to be a MMORTS, not a MMORPG. Bungie told fans (yes, I loved Bungie for making Myth and Marathon) that different servers would handle different zones on the ringworld, and that they were working on techniques to reduce lag. Granted, much of what we were told was vapourware, but it still got many people

anyone notice that one of the UI screenshots looked just like WoW, just done in glowing neon, without the gryphons on the end of the skillbar? heck even the inventory slots are on the end and look like bags.

It does, but 90% of all MMORPG's coming out all look like they ripped off the WoW UI. That's not terrible though. There are things that could be better about WoW's UI, but overall it's a pretty good basic system for controlling a character in such a world.

I have mod points but rather than spend them modding you up, I just have to post how much I agree.

Halo is without any doubt in my mind, the most over-rated game of all time, it's an 'ok' shooter with a fairly limp story and a main character with absoloutely and utterly no soul or 'coolness' at all, yet is promoted (and somehow loved) as some awesome hero character, frankly I don't know if I played and finished the same game as other gamers.

Don't forget that it seemed to borrow liberally from Half Life, but it didn't have nearly as good of a story as Half Life, nor the level design. Yet Halo seems to be unfairly credited as this innovative thing. In reality, Halo had many features cut when it was first moved from the Mac to the XBox and wasn't nearly the game that was promised. For many people however, it was their first experience at multi-player FPS as opposed to just playing against the computer. That multi-player experience is what so

The funny thing is all the big FPS games that came before it that heralded the real dawn of FPS multiplayer. Quake II, Unreal then Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Counter-Strike just to name some of the big ones off the top of my head.

Yet NONE of those tried to make a MMO out of it. I dare say that most of the developers realized (quite rightly) that the stuff that generally makes for a good FPS has nothing to do with a good MMO. Making up the story/universe in an MMO is the easy part. Getting the gameplay

Halo was much, much more rooted in 'Marathon'. That was a Mac game, and one of the best Mac shooters ever. The plasma gun, in particular, and its charging up was a very Marathon touch. This is also because the same company, and many of the same employees, made both.
I was upset when Microsoft bought Bungie and kept it off the Mac: it would have been a 'must-have' application for Mac owners, and a real incentive to get Macintoshes.

Half-Life and Halo predominantly feature the armor you fight in. The armor in Halo looks very inspired by the suit from Half-Life.

Both games are about fighting aliens. In Half-Life, those aliens include head-crabs who turn people into zombie-like creatures. In Halo, you fight aliens including head-crabs which turn people into zombie-like creatures.

The protagonists each wear what is essentially the same generic armorsuit that sci-fi characters have been wearing for years, if not decades.

Same problem with your assertion that "both games are about fighting aliens." Well, yeah. So are a ton of other games, many of which predate Half-Life. I don't see anything original about that idea at all.

The Flood and the Headcrabs are pretty much the only similar enemies that come to mind, and even then it's not at all an original idea. Both are different takes o

Halo is without any doubt in my mind, the most over-rated game of all time...

You've obviously never heard of Starcraft. Let me tell you about it. Starcraft was an RTS which is consistently touted as being the greatest RTS ever made, when, in fact, it did absolutely nothing special. It had a good story, that was it. Yet its fanboys will still tell you that it was the greatest RTS ever crafted (and that it wasn't just "Warcraft in space", which it most certainly was). That, my friend, is almost the very definition of "most over-rated game of all time".

Sure? I mean, it seems plausible to me, let's go with it. I specifically didn't deny the possibility that such claims could exist toward Halo, but I seriously have yet to hear anyone proclaim it to be the best FPS of all time. In fact, given the gamers I've interacted with on the intertubes, I wouldn't be willing to stake a claim that there's any consensus at all as to what the best FPS of all time is. Every other genre seems to have one or two favorites, but FPS has always seemed to be rather fractured to

Starcraft single player was average, and the multiplayer was good.Brood wars, was average single player, but had the perfect blend for multiplayer. balanced and diverse, with fast paced 5minute games and hour long marathons all possible. It requires the perfect blend of skill, macro strategy and micro (too much mirco for me but meh) and the game has had more patches then a typical MMO. Blizzard supports its games long after they are released and keeps the players happy.

That depends on what you're looking for. Starcraft was tightly designed with everything having a purpose (and sometimes more than one), TA felt like a random mishmash of unit ideas with the thought that more = better.

Blizzard doesn't do "innovative", they do "right". Starcraft wasn't something terribly new (though RTSes didn't have such diverse factions before it) but it was so well made it was simply better than the competition. If you look at (semi-recent) Blizzard games that's how they all go, not very innovative but very well done and always outperforming the competition. And what they do best is mass-market appeal. There are always the niche games with their fans that scoff at the lack of depth in the mainstream ga

Just because something isn't innovative and borrows heavily from other games does not disqualify it from being a very good game.

Sure, if you are trying to rate 'innovation' then yes, Starcraft was not very innovative. If you are trying to rank 'originality' then it wasn't very original either.

But something can be original, innovative, or both and still be a flop. Very often, innovative things will fail, and the next go round someone borrows from that innovation, refines it, and puts it into a good format

>Sarcraft was an RTS which is consistently touted as being the greatest RTS ever made, when, in fact, it did absolutely nothing special. It had a good story, that was it.

Starcraft did not have a good story - mostly generic sci fi events, and the setting was lifted from warhammer 40k. Most 'craft fans doubt that blizzard ripped off 'hammer, but then I ask why blizzard hired Andy Chambers as their creative director for starcraft 2 right after he left games workshop.

Starcraft was an RTS which is consistently touted as being the greatest RTS ever made, when, in fact, it did absolutely nothing special.

So which RTS is the best? I would love to compare this RTS to Starcraft's sales numbers, fame, meta critic rating, awards, and it's staying power in professional gaming.

Hell, even if you come up with a real argument describing why Starcraft isn't the best, Starcraft would need to have poor to decent ratings from some critics/gamers for your post to make an ounce of sense. Since there are rarely any gamer or critic reviews that even give it lower than an excellent rating, you are completely of your rocker

Since there are rarely any gamer or critic reviews that even give it lower than an excellent rating, you are completely of your rocker saying it's the most overrated game.

No. This is, in fact, required for a game to be overrated. To be overrated, a game needs to be highly rated, but not deserving of its high rating. Saying that everyone praises the game, thus it isn't overrated, makes you off your rocker.

I suggest you play both games again to see how immensely different the two games are...

I've played both War2 and Starcraft recently (in the past 2 years or so, recent enough that my memory of it isn't unreliable), and they aren't immensely different at all. Starcraft is Warcraft in space. The fact that you don't want to admit it doesn't make it less so.
And f

Meh, Kratos feels like another one of those forced coolness characters like Dante (the DMC3 intro was so fucking cheesy...). Better than those emo suckers that seem to be all the rage as heroes these days but not by much.

The Halo-hype is best understood once you look at its historical context. Yes it wasn't the first ever FPS, not the first FPS with an immersive plot (at least one other posting here compares it to Half Life, something I immediatley recognised when playing it for the first time). What it was, however, was the first FPS that Console players were drawn to en-masse (see below for N64 goldeney note).

The simple fact of the matter was that prior to Halo mouse + keyboard was the only way to play an FPS with any degree of satisfaction, to the extent that Quake III for Dreamcast practically required you to buy these too. FPS's were very big on the PC platform at the turn of the century but had had a very rough time being accepted on the consoles for both this and cultural reasons (the same problem was faced by point and click management-em-ups like Civilisation, for example). Being an FPS nut at the time I found it very hard to get into the various console FPS's, include ports like Quake II on the PSX.

Most of the time this is because they got the controller setup fundamentally wrong and/or wouldn't let you configure your own. Most glaringly they insisted on having Forward,Back and yaw on the left stick, very very very rarely (if ever) were you afforded Forward, Back and strafe on one stick with pitch and yaw on the other. Often (and this is true for Doom on the GBA for example, I'd waited years for hand held Doom to be sorely dissapointed!) strafe was bunged on the shoulder buttons because the developers didn't know just how important they were. Halo got the controller config exactly spot on: you could effectively circle-strafe, and as such it became the first Console FPS that anyone could actually play.

The next major flaw was auto-aim, obvious to any mouser is the ability to aim in a fraction of a second to any pitch/yaw point around you and get a nice headshot, simply impossible on a console. Past FPS's usually had it take you an hour to line up a shot, drastically slowing things down and stunting the potential gameplay as a result. Halo got the autoaim spot on - it's so cunning you might never notice it's there - this combined with the ability to strafe allowed proper battles with hoards of baddies for the first time.

The offshoot of all of the above is that Halo was console gaming's Doom moment - N64's Goldeneye therefore might be similarly married up to Wolfenstein 3D. The half life (pun intended) of Doom has been immense, with an active community almost 15 years on, myself semi-inclulded. This is what we're seeing on the Consoles now, it looks so strange to us fogeys here, wishing the console kiddies would get off our lawns because whilst we can see that the game is well put together and the plot well executed we've seen it all before in one guise or another, but those "console kiddies" (apologies to those who are consolers but not kiddies anymore!) had not seen it before making it all new and exiting to them. Even though by our reckoning they're 15 years late.

The Halo-hype is best understood once you look at its historical context. Yes it wasn't the first ever FPS, not the first FPS with an immersive plot (at least one other posting here compares it to Half Life, something I immediatley recognised when playing it for the first time). What it was, however, was the first FPS that Console players were drawn to en-masse.

I'll give you that.

Most of the time this is because they got the controller setup fundamentally wrong and/or wouldn't let you configure your own. Most glaringly they insisted on having Forward,Back and yaw on the left stick, very very very rarely (if ever) were you afforded Forward, Back and strafe on one stick with pitch and yaw on the other. Often (and this is true for Doom on the GBA for example, I'd waited years for hand held Doom to be sorely dissapointed!) strafe was bunged on the shoulder buttons because the developers didn't know just how important they were. Halo got the controller config exactly spot on: you could effectively circle-strafe, and as such it became the first Console FPS that anyone could actually play.

No, no, no, no. Timesplitters was released for the PS2 as a launch title over a year before Halo 1. Halo's controls are directly ripped from this. TS also had totally configurable controls, again, a year before Halo. Also, despite TS essentially being a parody of every genre of FPS (and indeed action film) ever, it manages to have more innovation than Halo has in it's exoskeleton's little finger.

Honestly, the credit Halo gets for innovation... It's like telling a load of Tolkien fans how

Simple answer: frat boys. It was the first shooter that the beer-swilling thumbless muppet crowd could get into, for whatever reason. Kind of a follow-up to Goldeneye on the N64, but with network play.

It's not a great game, but it sells for the same reason that Madden 200x sells... it's what everyone else is doing, and it's cool.

I wouldn't think a Halo MMO would be feasible. Its FPS. Hellgate failure anyone? (And i had high hopes for that one) with an EPIC main character which CAN be done, Conan does a half decent job of it but you can't let everyone play a spartan.

In Conan you are a warrior just like everyone else. You are better than common warriors in theory but everyone has the same potential that you do. The halo universe is extremely unbalanced. There are only X number of spartans, certainly not enough to populate an MMO. And playing Halo MMO as a marine would be more of a Team Fortress with experience and items type game. Not a bad idea for a game, but an idea that doesn't fit the Halo universe at all.

I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.

There are exceptions to each rule (I like both styles of play myself and I really enjoy the story to Halo) but you have to appeal to a very large group of people to keep an MMO going. It was a smart decision to cancel the project and I appreciate the fact that they were willing to forgo some quick easy cash in order to work on something else.

You obviously know alot about MMO gaming but I think your conclusions are based on massive (heh) assumptions about the gameplay and how they were going to integrate this game into the Halo universe.

You talk about there "not being enough spartans..." and other limitations you foresee based on the Halo FPS storyline. Fact is, the game 'writers' could dream up any scenario they wanted to explain why there were more units. A post-apocalyptic alternate universe for example. The doors are wide open.

You bring up a very good point, but there are canon related issues when such a huge change to things are made. Playing Spartan-3s would be very appealing and interesting, but when put into context of the rest of the universe it becomes harder and harder to hide that many secret people. I would love to see it done correctly, but I have doubts that it will ever exsist due to market saturation and gameplay balancing. On the whole MMOs are moving to be more PvP based because PvP content creates itself if you gi

You are forgetting one thing that the Xbox does. It makes Microsoft relevant. If Microsoft can stop being associated with Windows and Office which most people have issues with, and start being associated with the Xbox, they have mindshare. It also helps keep at least one product from being "generic", for example, Live Messenger can easily be replaced with Pidgin, or AIM, Office can be replaced with another word processor, Windows can be replaced with your favorite operating system, Live Search by Google/Yah

"If Microsoft can stop being associated with Windows and Office which most people have issues with, and start being associated with the Xbox..."

Which most people have issues with (Red Ring). Sorry, but I just had to point that out. Even if they become more associated with XBox than Windows, they're still associated with a system known for failing.

It's a shame that so few of us are really able to accept the idea of having "betters" in an MMO. Personally, I always felt the most exciting moments of WoW were when I was a lower level character being victimised. Sure, it probably riled me, but as the levels progressed and the skill/win bandwidth between players narrowed, the game became far less emotionally interesting.

I wouldn't think a Halo MMO would be feasible. Its FPS. Hellgate failure anyone? (And i had high hopes for that one) with an EPIC main character which CAN be done, Conan does a half decent job of it but you can't let everyone play a spartan.

In Conan you are a warrior just like everyone else. You are better than common warriors in theory but everyone has the same potential that you do. The halo universe is extremely unbalanced. There are only X number of spartans, certainly not enough to populate an MMO. And playing Halo MMO as a marine would be more of a Team Fortress with experience and items type game. Not a bad idea for a game, but an idea that doesn't fit the Halo universe at all.

I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.

There are exceptions to each rule (I like both styles of play myself and I really enjoy the story to Halo) but you have to appeal to a very large group of people to keep an MMO going. It was a smart decision to cancel the project and I appreciate the fact that they were willing to forgo some quick easy cash in order to work on something else.

They should have made it like Planetside or WWII Online. An MMO can be an FPS too.

The "normal" people in the COH / COV universe are the minions, the victims, etc. The civillians don't even have a level, in fact.

According to Statesman's intentions at one point, it would take about 3 minions _and_ a lieutenant to be a 50%-50% fight against a player. You know, better have an inspiration (potion) or two, if it starts going downhill. Bosses are nastier, but realistically only elite bosses are any danger to a hero. I've soloed el

I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.

Does it really have to be one OR the other? Take a look at Tabula Rasa (there's a free trial), it uses a system somewhere in-between that actually works really well.

A true Halo MMO would be possible, but the way Ensemble was going about it was completely wrong. Ensemble was using magic and practically copying WoW. If they had read the Halo books and followed the story, it could have been great.

You would start out as a 5-year old human doing some basic puzzle scenarios. Jumping puzzles, vehicle training, ect (aka an extended tutorial). Then you get medical augmentations to increase your abilities (Non-magica

I remember reading about someone licensing a Multiverse engine and the Firefly property about 4 years back, and then never hearing about it again, but then tons and tons of MMOs were canceled in droves around that time.

It doesn't look like there was any great loss, it seems very generic. How on Earth do you take Halo and manage to get "burly bearded man with swords" and "sultry technicolour wizardess" or "leggy spandex laser girl"? The art style has about a 90% debt to WoW and CoH, and about a 10% debt to the franchise from which it was apparently spun.

Halo is sweet, but what about piloting new mechs? It's been years since MS bought Mechwarrior. What's with the same old '04 Mechs that don't even run reliably on Vista.
MW4 is 2,000 internet years old.
That sucks.

Actually, I'm glad that you bought up the subject of Mechwarrior because I thoroughly enjoyed Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance and won't sound like I'm trolling when I say that I really don't get the big hoohah about Halo.

No, I don't own a console, just a PC and I did play Halo I right through to the end. Yes, it was quite pretty but the AI sucked, particularly for the troops who were on your side trying to drive vehicles through rocks with you manning a gun turret, plus the tiny cackling aliens gave it a feel of "

The problem with Mechwarrior was that the licencing was a nightmare--not just expensive, but held by a bunch of different people, with a lot of cross-competing claims to various aspects of mecha. Even if you pay one guy for the rights to mech X, guy with the rights to mech Y might sue, and even if it's a bogus lawsuit, it costs more money. I suspect anyone considering a mechwarrior video game just throws up their hands at the mess.

I think a Halo MMO (in it's loosest terms) would be great if they kept the FPS shooter portion, removed any dice roll mechanics, and switched it to a planet-sized tiered RvR world with capturable points and scenarios, ala Warhammer Online. But leave it on a console.

Maybe make leveling not so stat focused, more like training areas where you cut your teeth with a boot camp, then some simple NPC skirmishes, then into low-level scenarios, and then up to full battlefield situations. Each tier lets you earn y